1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dehydrating device. More particularly, the present invention relates to a dehydrating device effective for removing water from foods.
2. Description of the Related Art
As means which is contacted with a food to remove water therefrom at a low temperature under interception of air, there have been proposed various dehydrating devices, for example, devices disclosed in Japanese Examined Patent Publication No. 58-58124 and Japanese Patent Applications No. 59-88308, No. 59-88310 and No. 90893. These devices have a dehydrating function in principle and can be used for dehydration of foods. However, these known devices are defective in that handling is difficult, they are easily broken and production is difficult.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,383,376, there is described a dehydrating sheet for drying protein-containing food. It was difficult to directly blend a polymeric water absorber with a hydrophilic high osmotic pressure substance. This is because the polymeric water absorber absorbs water contained in the high osmotic pressure substance to increase the viscosity of the blend and make the blend impossible to flow, which makes the preparation of a dehydrating sheet extremely difficult and because the blend becomes like solid poor in flowability and therefore results in a sheet poor in flexibility to make the contact of the sheet with an object to be dehydrated inferior so that the dehydrating capacity of the resulting sheet is poor. In order to overcome the problems, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,383,376, as is described in the examples, a construction has been proposed in which a polymeric water absorber is covered by paper or the like and a high osmotic pressure substance is arranged around the covered polymeric water absorber. However, for the preparation of the proposed sheet, it is necessary to provide a step to remove air from the space between the covering paper and the polymeric water absorber and also necessary to simultaneously handle liquids and solids, which makes the preparation of the sheet troublesome and expensive.